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I collected 498 responses to my polyamory survey. Of these, 19 (3.8%) were deleted for being monogamous, leaving me with 479 respondents. The survey was promoted primarily on my blog, Thing of Things, and Slate Star Codex. For this reason, it is primarily representative of the rationalist community. 81% of respondents identified as rationalists.
Limitations
Due to a miscommunication with Scott Alexander, the polyamory survey as posted on Slate Star Codex failed to clarify that single people who would be nonmonogamous if they were dating anyone should take the survey. This may lead to underrepresentation of single respondents.
Mid-survey, I added some clarifications, which included defining “assigned gender at birth” and informing people who don’t know what a rationalist is
At least one person failed to follow instructions and included platonic primary partners; I do not expect the number of people who both have platonic primary partners and are bad at following directions to be high enough to distort the data. While I attempted to create categories that would encompass many different ways of doing polyamory, some forms may not be accommodated; for example, one participant complained that he slept with dozens of new people every year but, as he does not have many relationships, was recorded in the survey as having no partners. I do not expect people this unusual to distort the results much.
Several people refused to take the survey because they felt uncomfortable classifying their gender, sexual orientation, or romantic orientation within the boxes given. This survey may underrepresent queer people with unusual genders or orientations. Some participants felt that “transgender” is a term which only includes binary-gendered people; thus, nonbinary people may either have been underrepresented or incorrectly included as cisgender.
The definition of “sex” was confusing to several respondents. In particular, some respondents included cybersex as sex, while some did not. Depending on whether you consider cybersex to be sex, my survey may either undercount or overcount how much sex people are having.
Do Cis Straight Poly People Exist?
Before we can determine whether polyamory works well for cisgender heterosexual people, it is first necessary to determine whether cis straight poly people exist at all.
The answer appears to be “yes”. The gender, sexual orientation, and romantic orientation breakdown of respondents is as follows:
7.1% asexual
42.7% bisexual
42.9% heterosexual
7.3% homosexual
1.5% aromantic*
45.5% biromantic
44.7% heteroromantic
8.4% homoromantic
54.4% cisgender male
24.9% cisgender female
7.5% transgender person assigned female at birth
13.2% transgender person assigned male at birth
(There was a high overlap between “heteroromantic” and “heterosexual”, “biromantic” and “bisexual”, etc.)
However, I live in Berkeley, so I am aware that cisgender straight poly people often do things that many monogamous people would not consider to be very heterosexual or cisgender. For this reason, I included two additional questions to test whether someone is paradigmatically cisgender and heterosexual.
I asked heterosexual people whether they had had sex with a person of the same gender, or with any transgender person. (After some consideration, I chose to include all transgender people, on the grounds that cis people seem to consider sex with any of us to be kinda gay.) I clarified that “sex” includes any activity two or more people are doing, at the same time, which is primarily intended to cause sexual arousal or orgasm in one or more participants, and that it still counts if a person of your preferred gender was also involved, you didn’t touch their genitals, one or both of you didn’t get naked, it was BDSM, it was exclusively over the Internet, etc. 40.5% of heterosexual respondents have had sex with a person of the same gender, or with any transgender person.
I asked cisgender people whether they have taken any steps conventionally considered to be part of a gender transition process, such as taking cross-sex hormones; asking people to refer to them with different pronouns or a name not associated with their assigned gender; binding, tucking, or wearing clothing or makeup conventionally associated with the other primary gender on a regular basis; or deliberately altering their presentation to cause people to read them as the gender they weren’t assigned at birth. 13.6% of cisgender respondents have taken a step conventionally considered to be part of a gender transition process.
It is now possible to calculate what percentage of poly people are paradigmatically straight and cisgender. 21.5% of poly people in my sample were paradigmatically cis and straight. Rationalists were more likely to be paradigmatically cis and straight than nonrationalists: 36% of rationalists were paradigmatically cis and straight. 33% of cisgender men were paradigmatically cis and straight, while only 8% of cisgender women were paradigmatically cis and straight. This reflects the common polyamorous wisdom that cisgender, heterosexual poly women are very rare.
*I used a narrow definition of aromantic, in which a person is uninterested in having any relationships described as “girlfriend,” “boyfriend,” or “partner”, rather than a broader definition in which one might have partners that one is not romantically attracted to.
Are Poly People Cucks?
Many people accuse polyamorous people, particularly men, of being cucks: that is, they are sexually aroused by the idea of their partners having sex with other people. Unaccountably, no one has ever collected data on this claim.
At first blush, this generalization seems accurate: 78.7% of respondents reported that they found the prospect of a partner having sex with someone else arousing, even if only a little bit or only in particular situations. However, only 15.2% of respondents found it arousing in a submissive way, as implied by the word “cuck” (e.g. you are aroused by your partner having sex with other people because you find it humiliating). 29.4% found it arousing in a dominant way (e.g. the idea that you might “force” your partner to have sex with someone else). The majority of respondents, 76.8%, found it arousing in a non-kinky fashion (e.g. because it is hot when your partner has orgasms).
Further, this arousal is not a significant driver of people’s interest in polyamory: only 4.8% of respondents reported that this was a major reason for them to be poly.
I will now look at cisgender male respondents specifically, as this is a subject of particular interest. 79.3% of cisgender men found the prospect of a partner having sex with someone else arousing; 15.7% were aroused in a submissive way, 35.7% in a dominant way, and 73.4% in a non-kinky way. 7.2% said that this was a major reason for them to be polyamorous. Cisgender men appear to have approximately the same pattern as everyone else, although they are perhaps slightly more likely to be interested in a dominant fashion and less likely to be interested in a nonkinky fashion; cis men may also be more likely to have this as a primary reason for them to be poly.
Therefore, I have concluded that, while poly men are typically aroused by their partners having sex with other people, poly men are not in fact cucks, nor is this a major reason for them to be poly. I am unclear on whether it is a good idea to raise awareness of these results, however. If you must humiliate someone for their partner having sex with other people, you should at least humiliate the people who get off on it.
Tune in next post for answers to a variety of other exciting questions such as:
- Are poly people satisfied in their relationships?
- How many people are poly people dating?
- Are poly cis men lonelier than poly trans people or poly cis women?
- How much sex are poly people having really?
- Are poly people more attracted to their primaries or their secondaries?
- And more!
sablin27 said:
“Cuck” is a disparagement of how you are doing manhood, paired with a salacious suggestion that you deserve the cheating your women are surely doing. The underlying assumptions are that everyone construes manhood the same way, that every worthwhile man is devoted to performing manliness, that having another person fuck your woman is a terrible failure of manhood as well as being a devastating betrayal by a loved one. But also that this is a great descriptor to apply people you hate and consider insufficiently manly.
Saying that some people get off on their partner having orgasms in a a non-masochistic way is only likely to work with people who already subconsciously suspected that and were ignoring the discrepancy, because that your partners sleep with other people isn’t the real accusation, it’s proof of the accusation that you are insufficiently manly.
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throwaway said:
You are ignoring the fact that many men really hate the idea of their woman sleeping with another man. This preference is probably hardwired, because there are good evolutionary reasons for this.
It is a strong gut feeling, so people assume (perhaps erroneously) that other men have the same kind of preference, and they are too powerless to stop your woman fucking other men or too afraid to break it off.
And I think this is what Ozy gets wrong in their post. When people say that poly men are ‘cucks’ they are not suggesting they get off from humiliation. In fact, they may be suggesting the opposite – they don’t enjoy the humiliation one bit, but go through it for the woman’s sake.
Are those people completely wrong? I have no doubt that there is a significant fraction of poly people (perhaps even a majority) who have little issues with jealousy. But there are also people who say things like:
‘Inasmuch as I had a System 2 override it was a utilitarian thought: the girlfriend is having fun, the guy she’s with is having fun, I’m a little bit miserable but I can be distracted by watching Billions on TV.’
and
‘And then I met Diana, and she said: “If you want to be with me, you better overcome it”. That sounded hard, but I did it, and I had to learn all the mind hacks for doing that.’
“Are poly men cucks?” == “Would poly men prefer to be in a committed monogamous relationship with one of their partners if their partner agreed to it?”.
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ozymandias said:
I feel like people with this belief about poly men really need to stop using porn jargon then. The porn jargon means a specific thing.
(This is a bit of a spoiler but the answer to your last question is “overwhelmingly no.”)
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throwaway said:
The word ‘cuckold’ existed long before porn and became a part of porn jargon much later.
> This is a bit of a spoiler but the answer to your last question is “overwhelmingly no.”
It’s not really my question, I was just trying to explain what people imply when they say ‘poly men are cucks’. Obviously it’s only one of the implications, but I didn’t want to discuss the shaming part of it. Shaming is bad and I agree that it also obscures the point.
Is the answer “overwhelmingly no” for paradigmatically straight men too? Also, how does one separate the stated vs revealed preferences? I.e. perhaps a significant percentage of people merely tolerate polyamory, while advocating for it.
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ozymandias said:
Yes, but the modern usage of the word “cuck” evolved out of the porn genre; it has its roots in 4Chan, a group of people noted for their porn consumption and not for their love of Shakespeare. (If it is the latter, of course, they can still prevent confusion by switching to “wears the horns.”)
While I haven’t yet broken down the data by sexuality, there are only eleven people who agree or strongly agree to “I would prefer not to be poly but if I were not poly I would not get dates,” and some of them are not paradigmatically cishet men. Even under the most generous assumptions at least 90% of paradigmatically cishet men are “strongly disagree” to “neutral” on the subject.
I can’t comment on whether people are self-deceiving, but I did get 80% of my sample to admit to being into their partners being fucked by other people and like a third of my sample to admit to getting laid once a month or less, so I feel like people are clearly willing to admit uncomfortable truths here!
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Extremely Anonymous said:
It’s very hard to honestly tell whether the fetish is a reason you’re poly or not. In my own case, I know it isn’t, but only because the fetish developed after I’d already been poly for years. In fact, I tried to develop a cuck fetish on purpose to make poly more fun, failed gave up, and later got one anyway.
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loki said:
Perhaps this is a little overgenerous and wouldn’t get the dramatic results, but I’d say that in order to be Definitely Straight or Definitely Cis, you don’t need to have *never* done the things you described – you need to not be doing them now and have no intention of doing them in the future.
Like, my ex-fiance is the most Cishet guy in my friend group and definitely is both those things – but he has *ever* tried doing stuff with a guy, one time, and for that reason can be extremely certain that he’s straight. I’d also suggest that it’s very likely that there’s a trait of experimentalness/openness to experience that will lead to a high correlation, in straight people, between having tried doing stuff with someone of the same gender one time to see what it was like and being poly.
(Possibly the same for cis people having ever tried on not being cis, but I’m less certain about that.)
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